Texas Passes Campus-Carry Laws, Along With 8 Other States

Danielle Vabner awoke on the morning of December 14, 2012, to find a string of missed phone calls from her mom. Worried that something was wrong, she called back immediately. “My mom sounded frantic,” recalls Danielle, who was a freshman at the State University of New York at New Paltz. “I could barely understand what she was saying.” As her mother kept talking, the unthinkable news became clear: There had been a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Danielle’s hometown of Newtown, Connecticut. Her 6-year-old brother, Noah, did not make it out alive.

Winter break was painful, and when Danielle returned to college for her second semester, she felt lost, unsure of what to say to friends. She struggled to believe that Noah — a spirited first-grader who loved superheroes and pranks — was gone. “It was really hard to know how to behave around the friends I knew before it happened,” she says. “They didn’t want to bring it up and upset me, and so I didn’t bring it up either. I kept it bottled up.” While Danielle finished out the year, she felt an overwhelming urge to start anew. So she applied to The University of Texas at Austin and headed there for her sophomore year. “I had never been to Texas in my life,” she reveals. “I just wanted to get away.”

After the move, however, Danielle threw herself into a new mission that hit close to home: She became deeply involved
in a debate riling up the Lone Star State — whether concealed weapons should be allowed on college campuses. The dispute is part of a clash over gun laws playing out across the country. In the years since Sandy Hook, there have been at least 186 school shootings in America, according to the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety. Each incident feeds a debate over the Second Amendment, with gun-safety advocates seeking tougher regulations on gun sales, and gun-rights proponents citing their constitutional right to bear arms and their right to defend themselves.

When Danielle learned that Texas was considering the passage of a broad “campus-carry” law, she took action, submitting written testimony arguing against it to state officials. “I wrote about how I had lost my brother and how I felt, not just as a survivor but as a student,” she shares. She also spoke at campus rallies and handed out flyers, noting, “I couldn’t believe how many students didn’t know about the bill.” At the time, state law allowed concealed weapons in public walkways on campus but not in buildings. The proposed new bill would require universities to allow licensed individuals — including students, faculty, and staff — to carry concealed guns almost anywhere on campus.

The legislation — Senate Bill 11 — was signed into law in June 2015. Activists worked with lawmakers to modify it and helped schools gain some discretion over where it is appropriate to allow guns. For instance, at UT Austin, guns will be banned in potential hot spots such as disciplinary hearings and laboratories with dangerous chemicals. But firearms will be allowed in classrooms, as schools cannot adopt policies that “generally prohibit or have the effect of generally prohibiting” license holders from carrying concealed handguns on campus, according to SB 11. “It’s the law and we have to comply,” points out Gary Susswein, executive director of media relations and issues management at UT Austin. “But our president [Gregory L. Fenves] does not like this law,” he adds, because he is concerned about recruiting students and faculty members. Indeed, Frederick Steiner, the dean of the School of Architecture at UT Austin for 15 years, resigned in February in part over the law.

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In 2015, 18 states proposed laws to permit guns on campus, with only the Texas bill passing. Texas is the ninth state to require colleges to allow guns on campus in some capacity. Currently, 18 states and Washington, D.C., effectively prohibit guns on campus. In the remaining 23 states, colleges set their own policy on guns, and most schools do not allow firearms on campus.

Under the Texas law, people must be 21 or older and have a license to carry a concealed handgun, so it will be mostly upperclassmen, graduate students, and employees who will be legally able to bring guns on campus. Private universities can opt out, and most have done so, according to a survey of 38 schools conducted by The Texas Tribune. “There is no evidence that allowing the carrying of guns on our campus will make the campus safer,” wrote David Leebron, the president of Houston’s Rice University, in a campuswide email.

The law will be in effect when public school students return to their campuses this fall. Quincy Bulin, 20, will enter
her junior year at UT Austin, and has mixed feelings about SB 11. “In one sense, it’s not a big deal because we live in
Texas and guns are just part of the culture,” she observes. “At the same time, it’s a huge deal to have concealed weapons
on campus because you’re basically giving people the ability to kill.” Ultimately, she adds, people who want to
commit acts of violence will do so regardless of a campus-carry law. “All you can do is trust those around you.”

Michael Newbern, assistant director of public relations for the advocacy group Students for Concealed Carry supports the Texas law, arguing that people have a right to self-defense. A U.S. Navy veteran and a recent graduate of The Ohio State University, Michael has a license to carry a concealed weapon, but could not carry it on campus. He says he became an activist for campus-carry laws when he began thinking about how students are vulnerable to crime. “I’m six feet two, 210 pounds: I can fight back. But what about people who can’t? What about disabled people or small-statured ones?” he asks. “It is morally reprehensible to limit how people defend themselves.”

Colin Goddard has a different perspective. A survivor of the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, he says that in a mass
shooting, it’s hard to think at all, let alone defend oneself. “People casually debate this issue and fabricate scenarios
in their heads, but you don’t know how you’ll react in the craziest moment you could never imagine. Time shuts down,” he explains. “When you are conjugating verbs in French class and suddenly someone is shooting at you, it’s not easy to respond.” The Virginia Tech massacre, which killed 32 people, spurred states to begin considering whether or not to permit guns on campus. “I was taken aback by the idea that the way to stop school shootings was to allow guns on campus,” Colin states. “I thought, Did they ever talk to survivors?” Now a senior policy advocate at Everytown for Gun Safety, he still has three bullets in his body and a titanium rod in his left femur as a result of the attack.

Another argument of campus-carry proponents is that guns can help women protect themselves against sexual
assault. Amanda Collins, a cofounder of the advocacy group Women for Concealed Carry, speaks from experience: She was a student at the University of Nevada, Reno when a stranger grabbed her from behind, forced her to the ground, and raped her in a campus parking garage in 2007. “There was a point during the attack when I knew I could have stopped it if I’d had my gun,” she says. Though a gun owner with a concealed weapons permit, she was not allowed to bring her gun on campus. “I don’t think everyone should carry a gun, but I think women should be given a choice. It’s important to allow women to decide how to defend their bodies.” Opponents of campus-carry laws may “assert that they are looking out for my best interests,” she allows. “But they have no idea how it feels to be completely helpless.”

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Not all survivors share Amanda’s view. Jade Reindl, a senior at Florida State University and cofounder of the Florida Coalition to Keep Guns Off Campus, was raped by someone she knew when she was an intern in Washington,
D.C., in 2014. “A gun would not have helped me whatsoever,” Jade says, noting that most sexual assaults are committed
by someone you know, not strangers. “We like the illusion of control. In reality we don’t know what will happen.” She feels that guns have no place on campus, noting that she herself would not have been fit to carry a gun after her ordeal, as she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Many students agree with her stance, according to a 2013 study at Indiana’s Ball State University. In a survey of more than 1,600 students across 15 public universities in the Midwest, 78% replied they did not want concealed handguns on campus. Most students also said they believe that allowing concealed weapons on campus would increase the number of suicides and homicides. Half did not know whether their university had a policy regarding firearms on campus. This past May the governor of Georgia, Nathan Deal, vetoed the state’s campus-carry bill, saying, “if the intent of [the law] is to increase safety of students on college campuses, it is highly questionable that such would be the result.” Presidents of the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech were among those who spoke out against it before the governor vetoed the bill. In Tennessee, however, a bill became law the same month that allowed licensed full-time faculty and staff to carry concealed guns on public college campuses.

Some professors are taking a stand in Texas, too. Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize–winning physics professor at UT Austin, has said he will ban guns in his classroom, even if he gets sued. At the University of Houston, professors at a faculty forum made headlines when they discussed the possibility of avoiding hot-button topics in class since people can disagree, tempers might flare, and guns could be present. Shawn Lindsey, director of media relations at the school, confirmed the discussion among professors, but says that it does not reflect the school’s policy. The Texas bill’s House sponsor, state Rep. Allen Fletcher, has said that opponents have exaggerated the possible consequences of campus-carry laws, noting, “the idea that this bill will result in any increase in violence is unfounded.

There is no easy answer to whether guns protect people or create more danger, declares Adam Winkler, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles’s School of Law, and the author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. “Guns can be an effective means of self-defense in some circumstances,” he says. “But often, pulling a gun in a heated situation doesn’t work so well because you’re nervous.” He points out that there is a heightened risk of guns causing accidental deaths when people are drinking and partying. However, he says, few students have guns on campus, even at institutions where they’re allowed. “I think it’s about the symbolism of the laws. Should guns be normalized and part of our everyday existence, or should we teach young people that there are places where guns don’t belong?”

A number of students in Texas are gearing up to protest SB 11 later this month. Jessica Jin, 25, a 2014 graduate of
UT Austin, has signed up more than 10,000 people on Facebook for one rally. “I hope this reminds people to reexamine what they think is acceptable in society,” she says. “We should not feel indifferent to the fact that many people die by guns every week in America, but we should not submit to the fearful rhetoric that causes people to believe they won’t survive a normal day at school unless they’re armed to the teeth.” Danielle Vabner, now 22, graduated from UT Austin this past spring, and says that unless a new job takes her elsewhere, she plans to be among the demonstrators. She’ll be wearing a personal tribute to Noah — a tattoo on her wrist of his name, flanked by angel wings.